After a couple of quiet years, after welcoming a child into this world, the Montreal band Thus Owls is back with the new song A Shade Of Green. It's given to you along with a lo-fi, distorted black and white video, as intimate and bare as the song itself. 

"When we first wrote A Shade Of Green, I thought the song was about the dormant love for someone else, but I recently learnt that it is as much about the yet undiscovered and uncovered love for your own being. There is so much emotional pain to heal in an adult life, and step by step we try to face our fears to resolve the knots we carry deep inside. To create is a healing process, and sometimes the subconscious speaks to us and appears in our art long before our conscious self is aware of it. It is a beautiful and powerful thing.” says singer Erika Angell. 

A Shade Of Green was recorded at Hotel2Tango in Montreal last year, when the final heatwave of the summer hit the city. One take, one song, one voice, as is. The goal was to capture the live nerve and presence of the song. The only added element to this take being the siren sounding trumpets that were captured in the dead of dark winter in Erika's childhood home in Sweden.

The explorative band Thus Owls, aka Swedish-Canadian couple Erika and Simon Angell, is with the release of A Shade Of Green announcing their own independent label and creative home; For The Living And The Dead, under which they will continue to present and release their art in the future.

Featured on A Shade Of Green:
Erika Angell - vocals, piano / Simon Angell - wurlitzer, vocals, Samuel Joly - drums, vocals / Marc-André Landry - bass / Emil Strandberg - trumpet / Laurel Sprengelmeyer - vocals / Michael Feuerstack - vocals / Nocolas Basque - vocals

01 A Shade Of Green

Thus Owls reveals a second song, entitled Future/Past, from their upcoming album. The song features the seven piece band that collaborated on the album. Next to the core trio of Erika Angell, Simon Angell and drummer Samuel Joly, there are three additional guitarists; Laurel Sprengelmeyer (Little Scream), Michael Feuerstack and Nicolas Basque (Plants and Animals), along with bass player Marc-André Landry. 

Future/Past is built around a dream. One of those dreams they say are so common when you carry a child. A subconscious and desperate attempt to make sense of something so unimaginably abstract as a human being growing inside of you. As in dreams, you find yourself being transferred quickly, from one place to another. Starting out sparsely, in dark space, the song abruptly shifts into a swinging instrumental groove that eventually builds and ends in an euphoric choir where everybody sings their heart out.

Future/Past

Solar Eclipse is the third single release from Thus Owls' new album "The Mountain That We Live Upon". This song was the first song written for this album and the seed to the whole writing cycle. The song is inspired by the ancient works of the Greek poet Sappho (630-580 BC) gathered in a beautiful edition by Anne Carson called "If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho". The lyrics even contain some fragments of these poems, mixed with texts by Erika Angell. Solar Eclipse embodies all the core elements of this record in one and the same song and is the center piece of the whole album.

Solar Eclipse

The mesmerizing and dark velvet sounding Thus Owls from Montreal is built around the core of Swedish-Canadian couple Erika and Simon Angell. Simon’s harshly charismatic guitar blends with the urgency of Erika’s vocals to create a sound that bends and stretches their unusual compositions into ever newer and surprising shapes.

Solar Eclipse

Thus Owls

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